What is drug detox in Łódź?
Drug detox at our clinic is an intravenous infusion lasting several hours, given after qualification and under the supervision of medical staff. It eases withdrawal symptoms, replenishes fluids and electrolytes, allows the patient to sleep and breaks a day spent without food or water.
What the infusion does not do matters just as much. It does not remove the drug from the body: the pace of elimination is set by the half-life of the substance and by the work of the kidneys and liver, and a drip does not speed that up. It does not treat addiction, because that is the job of addiction therapy in Łódź, spread over months. Nor does it replace a hospital ward when the withdrawal itself threatens health.
Families most often book an infusion after several days of continuous use, when the person close to them is not sleeping, not eating and is dehydrated. That is a sensible reason and an honest description of what this service covers. The plan that follows is described under drug addiction treatment in Łódź.
What we check before giving an infusion, and whom we turn away
The interview before the infusion is not a formality. We ask about the substance and the doses of recent days, about alcohol taken together with the drug, about prescription medicines, heart disease, epilepsy, past seizures and psychiatric disorders. We measure blood pressure, pulse, oxygen saturation and temperature, and we assess consciousness and hydration.
Some answers end the qualification, and we say so plainly:
- addiction to heroin or other opioids: we refer to substitution treatment,
- regular use of benzodiazepines or GHB: a gradual dose reduction under round-the-clock supervision is needed,
- pregnancy: withdrawal can be more dangerous for the child than for the mother, so care belongs to a specialist team, not to an outpatient clinic,
- seizures, delirium or confusion within the last few days,
- no sober person to collect the patient and stay with them overnight.
Relatives sometimes read this as a refusal of help. It is help: a referral to a place that will actually handle the risk.
When not to book an infusion but to seek emergency care?
There are situations in which waiting for an appointment is the wrong decision. If you observe seizures, loss of consciousness, breathing difficulties, an irregular heartbeat, a high fever with muscle rigidity, delirium or growing confusion in someone close to you, emergency care is needed, not a drip at a clinic.
The same applies to suicidal thoughts voiced during a comedown, and to a situation in which nobody knows what was taken or in what amount while the condition worsens from hour to hour. Taking a drug together with alcohol is a separate risk, because the symptoms of two withdrawals overlap.
This section is short on purpose. An outpatient infusion handles troublesome symptoms, not emergencies.
An infusion at the clinic or a hospital ward: how to decide?
One question settles it: can the person close to you spend the next dozen or so hours at home? An infusion at the clinic ends with discharge the same day, so the night after the procedure passes without medical staff.
An infusion is right when exhaustion, dehydration, insomnia, irritability and loss of appetite dominate after stimulants have been stopped, and vital signs remain stable. Round-the-clock supervision is right when benzodiazepines or GHB are involved, when there were seizures in the history, when a dose reduction spread over weeks is needed, or when nobody will stay with the patient after the return home.
When the interview points to the second option, we say so at once and refer to an addiction treatment centre in Łódź. We do not book an infusion only for someone to travel in and hear this on arrival.
Why are amphetamine, benzodiazepines and GHB three different situations?
The question of how long detox takes has no single answer, because the class of substance decides how it goes.
- Stimulants (amphetamine, cocaine, mephedrone): the comedown is mainly exhaustion, long sleep, low mood and dehydration. There is no accepted pharmacotherapy for this withdrawal, so we treat symptomatically and promise nothing more.
- Benzodiazepines: symptoms begin with a delay, from two to seven days, and can drag on for weeks. What is safe is stepping down the dose gradually, not stopping abruptly, and medication given intravenously can mask the onset of symptoms.
- GHB and GBL: here there is no outpatient option. Withdrawal can run a severe course, the usual sedative treatment is often ineffective, and the condition changes fast, so a hospital ward is needed.
- Legal highs and new psychoactive substances: the buyer usually does not know what they got, because the composition is swapped from batch to batch. The same powder can produce different symptoms the second time round.
- Cannabis products: the complaints are chiefly psychological and intravenous detox is not indicated here.
What detox in Łódź looks like: 3, 6 or 12 hours?
The patient arrives at Rogozińskiego 23, goes through qualification and measurement of vital signs, and is then connected to the infusion in a separate room. Staff monitor blood pressure and pulse during the procedure. After it ends and after a period of observation the patient goes home, always accompanied by another person, and does not drive that day.
The three-hour option covers rehydration and basic symptomatic treatment. The six-hour one allows longer observation when complaints are stronger. The twelve-hour one is intended for people after a long run of use, physically run down, with sleep disturbance lasting several days.
After several days on mephedrone: what the infusion will not do
The most common reason for a visit is the comedown after stimulants. The infusion shortens the day spent over a bowl, replenishes fluids and makes sleep possible. It does not shorten the action of the drug, it does not remove craving and it does not protect against a return to use a week later. This is symptomatic treatment, not an antidote.
The same infusion with a home visit
We also administer the same detox at the patient's address, when the patient qualifies for the outpatient option but reaching Rogozińskiego 23 is a real problem, for example after extreme weakness following a comedown or a lack of transport. The qualification criteria and the list of exclusions stay identical: opioids are referred to substitution treatment, benzodiazepines and GHB require a ward, and seizures, pregnancy or the absence of a sober companion still rule this route out. What does change is the available length of the procedure: with a home visit you can choose 1, 2, 3, 6 or 12 hours (on site 3, 6 or 12), matched by the medical staff to the patient's condition. It is a separate price variant, whose cost and availability we confirm at registration.
What the detox drip contains: what we actually give
There is no single ready-made set. The composition is chosen by medical staff after qualification, based on the patient's condition, the substance taken and coexisting illnesses.
The basis is a rehydrating fluid, because after several days without food and water a shortage of water and salts is often the biggest problem. Added to it are electrolytes, chiefly magnesium, potassium and sodium, glucose in case of exhaustion, and B vitamins including thiamine. Separately, and only as needed, symptomatic medicines are given: anti-emetic, painkilling, sedative or sleep-inducing.
This is not a vitamin infusion from the regeneration offer, nor an antidote neutralising the drug. A detox drip corrects what the run of use has thrown out of balance, and there its role ends.
Drug detox in Łódź: what the regional data say
In the Łódź voivodeship, poisonings from legal highs and new psychoactive substances fell from 1 499 cases in 2015 to 28 in 2023, and rose to 56 in 2024 (Report of the Chief Sanitary Inspector for 2024, table 4). A decade of decline and a first rebound mean that the market is changing and that the composition of what someone buys is no longer predictable.
The second figure says more about the availability of help. In the region, substitution treatment covered 137 patients in 2017 and 163 in 2020, with a single outpatient facility running that programme in the whole voivodeship (Voivodeship Programme for the Łódź Voivodeship, regional assembly resolution no. XLVIII/579/22, table 21). For a person addicted to opioids this means a narrow road, but an existing one, and it is better to set out on it sooner than later.
Among more than 2 700 people treated in the region for disorders caused by psychoactive substances, close to three quarters were diagnoses of dependence syndrome and withdrawal syndrome, and around 13 per cent acute poisonings and harmful use (Statistics Poland data for 2019 in the same programme). In other words: most people enter the system not after a single poisoning, but after years of use.
Why do we say no with heroin and other opioids?
We do not carry out opioid detox on a drip, and it is not a question of equipment. Stopping heroin itself rarely threatens life. What threatens life is what happens afterwards: after a few days without the substance tolerance falls, and a return to the dose used before the break can kill.
The scale of the risk is described in the literature. Strang et al. (BMJ 2003, PMID 12727768) and Merrall et al. (Addiction 2010, PMID 20579009) point to a several-fold, on the order of three to eight times, higher risk of fatal overdose in the first weeks after use is broken off, highest in the first two. A twelve-hour infusion creates exactly that state and does not handle its consequences, which is why we refer people to substitution treatment.
A separate risk comes from counterfeit tablets sold as painkillers. They may contain nitazenes, opioids not rarely stronger than fentanyl, so the person taking them does not know their own dose. In that situation it is worth talking to a doctor about naloxone nasal spray, available in Poland on prescription.
